Do You Know How The Changes At EzineArticles Make You A Better Affiliate Marketer?

As a recognized super-affiliate and affiliate marketing mentor & speaker, it’s only natural that I use article marketing, including posting my articles at EzineArticles.com, as part of my affiliate marketing promotional mix. Natural because article marketing works, provides residual traffic for years, and because EzineArticles is the biggest & highest ranked article directory online.

Let me say right up front that if you’re looking to be lazy – using PLR articles, spun articles or those written by authors with poor spelling or bad grammar, forget it! EzineArticles have top-notch editors and systems that will boot you out faster than you can say ‘adios’! If you ARE looking to be a lazy affiliate, go get an offline job – the days of lazy marketers making a killing online ended a few years back (after declining since the 1990’s).

The EzineArticles Changes Affecting Affiliate Marketing

Two of the changes made this year at EzineArticles affect affiliates, and in fact all online marketers. First, the articles you submit must be at least 400 words now. This shouldn’t be a big deal, since we marketers tend to be overly verbose anyway! 😉 If you can’t write intelligently about a product, service or topic using AT LEAST 400 words with no fluff or keyword stuffing then you don’t know your topic well enough to consider promoting it – go back and study the issue more before trying to use it in your affiliate marketing mix.

The second change is the big one – you can’t use your affiliate links in your Author’s Resource Box now. This won’t affect super-affiliates as we’d never put our direct affiliate link out there like that anywway. And this is what YOU need to change in how you’re doing your online marketing if you’ve even THOUGHT about putting your naked affiliate link online anywhere…

Affiliate Marketing Pre-Selling On Your Blogs

For years now, brilliant marketer Ken Evoy has been teaching members and affiliates at his SiteSell operation about pre-selling… The concept is simple – you attract the prospect to your own site where you ‘warm them up’ and get them into a buying mood before sending them through to your affiliate link.

Why is pre-selling so important? First, someone coming from your articles or social media marketing efforts are in ‘reading mode’ – not ‘buying mode’. Secondly, many salespages are 2nd rate at best, with most not even that good. Pre-selling gives you the opportunity to up your conversion rates by helping to overcome this downfall. But most importantly, this system means you’re developing backlinks to YOUR sites or blogs and the traffic is flowing to YOU first – then hopefully on to wherever you’re trying to direct it. Better SEO rankings from the backlinks are a big plus to everything you do from today forward, and if a prospect isn’t overly interested in the product or service you’re promoting they may just find something that DOES interest you in the sidebar or basebar links.

Higher search engine rankings, more traffic, higher conversions, residual sales, better branding & bigger commissions – any of these align with your affiliate marketing goals? Guess maybe Ken was on to something, eh? LOL (There’s a LOT more to SiteSell – for site owners AND affiliates – but this one piece of advice by itself is worth more than he charges… )

So now you can see that the changes at EzineArticles.com really are in the best interest of their reading audience AND you as an affiliate marketer because they’re helping to motivate you to professionalize your online activities and take your affiliate marketing to the next level!

Affiliate marketing has low entry costs, and as such it’s a natural for many people looking to start home based businesses. And while it’s true that the most effective way to start affiliate marketing, as I teach in my affiliate coaching program, is through setting up niche blogs, one can always start home based businesses for free and build to that point as revenue permits.

So how do you start affiliate marketing without a website or blog? Start by deciding which niche you want to target first. It’s best to start with a topic you know a lot about, but that isn’t strictly necessary. As long as it’s a subject that interests you you can find the info you need online, in books, in magazines, etc. Then do a quick search for those topics and related areas at the major search engines – is there evidence of it being a viable niche? Forget the generic search results – are there paid ads above the results? Plenty of pay-per-click ads down the right side of the first few pages? Pay-per-click is an expensive form of advertising online, so if there are plenty of people using it in those niches you know there’s money to be made in those niches. Don’t guess – check it out!

Once you’ve found good niches that interest you and have a good advertising base online, look for affiliate programs that target those niches. Start at the big directories like ClickBank and LinkShare, then search for your keyword and put ‘affiliate program’ after it, such as ‘waterskiing affiliate program’ or ‘scrapbooking affiliate program’. Find some you like and set up an account. Be aware that some programs require you to already have a web site, so those you’ll have to leave til later. But get your links from those who don’t have that requirement and save them in an easy to find folder on your computer.

Now you start writing articles on the topics of interest within your niche – what we in the biz call article marketing. The articles are written in the third person and are NOT salespitches or salescopy – they’re good, informative articles between 350 and 800 words long. The idea is to give such great info that the people reading your articles will want to click your links at the end of each article to get more information. And because these articles are part of your affiliate marketing process, those links will be YOUR affiliate links. Your article topics don’t have to be advanced – remember that in every niche you have beginners, those with some experience and experts, plus those just starting to enquire about that niche, those whose curiosity is just now leading them to research the field.

Don’t pretend to be an expert – you’ll be setting yourself up for ridicule and lose credibility in the niche if you aren’t really knowledgeable. No one minds an article by someone just sharing information, so there’s no need to pretend to be an expert if it’s not true. Besides, there are few true experts in any niche, so as an affiliate marketer those aren’t your targeted prospects anyway – you’re after the bulk of the market. For broad appeal, aim at the newbies, the middle ground and the fairly curious in your niche.

The idea is to write articles and put your link(s) in the final paragraph, such as: Click to find out more about building your own wine cellar. If that were the product you wanted to promote, your article might have been about how to build a wine cellar, why you should build a wine cellar, 10 things you need when you build a wine cellar, temperature control when building a wine cellar, planning to build your first wine cellar, etc. Notice that each article suggestion revolves around what the product covers – building that wine cellar. That way you attract a very targeted audience that have the greatest likelihood of buying the product. Simply writing about great wines wouldn’t suffice, because too many of your readers would be those in apartments, in condos, those who already have a wine cellar, etc. Plus, the tighter you target the sub-nice the product applies to, the better your chances of good search engine rankings, since you’re no longer competing with everyone in the whole broad niche.

Now you want to get those articles published and have them starting to draw attention from targeted prospects. Your first step is to find those article directories that will let you use affiliate links – many won’t, insisting you can only use links to your own sites or directly to other sites without an affiliate link. To be honest this makes no sense to me – it seems an article directory should be concerned with the content of your articles and ensuring they only link to legitimate sites, not what type of link you use to get people there. And yes, I DO put my money where my mouth is on this point – our own article directory has no issue with you using affiliate links as long as your article has strong, useful content and links to an appropriate site. So start by submitting your article to the Articles-and-Content.com article directory and then as many others as you can find willing to take them, especially any article directories specific to your niche.

But you’re not done yet – there are a LOT of articles on a LOT of directories, and you want yours to stand out. Fortunately most article marketers aren’t pros, and they think that submitting their articles is all they need to do. As both an article marketer AND an affiliate marketer you know that content is 10% of the job – the other 90% is driving traffic to your content – lots of good highly-targeted traffic. Announce each new article as it’s published in the directory, using Twitter, FaceBook, Google Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. The more you can use these free sites to promote your articles, the greater your following can build – and the greater the chance the search engines will find a link to your article and index it that much quicker for you.

And just as the icing on the cake, as it were, every so often promote your author account at those directories as well. There’s usually a page that lists and links to all of your articles, so that’s the page you want to promote aft6er every 5 or 10 articles you publish.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that article marketing seldom leads to massive, immediate traffic or even quick small sales. It’s an empirical process, with each article bring in another trickle of results, and as in nature trickles combine to streams, streams combine to rivers, etc. Over time you can develop a huge body of work online, all capable of adding to the targeted traffic and thereby to the affiliate marketing commissions stream you’ll receive.

It’s seems a huge task when starting out, but think of it this way… One article a day is over 350 per year, 2 articles a day is over 700 a year, and if your can keep your article marketing efforts to an average of just 3 articles a day you’ll have published over 1,000 articles by one year from today. As article marketing expert Willie Crawford would say, that’s over 1,000 signposts pointing to your links. And as a super-affiliate, I say that’s over 1,000 links pointing to your bank account! 😉

One of the secrets to advanced affiliate marketing is to find ways to multiply your marketing reach without having to multiply the effort and time you put into your marketing strategies. For example, if you can invest 20% more time to reap 50% or 75% more sales, you’ve multiplied your efforts while saving time and are headed toward bigger advanced affiliate marketing commissions.

A perfect example of this is the relationship between your article marketing and your podcasting. Since both your targeted readers and your targeted listeners are both interested in the same niche, it stands to reason that both would enjoy access to the same content. And with independent directories for either type of media, chances are high that each attracts an audience of affiliate marketing needs not reachable by the other format.

Here’s how it’s done, and why it works so well to boost your affiliate sales. You’ve done your keyword research, chosen your topics for your articles and written 5 or 10 articles to start. Handle them exactly as you always would, submitting them to the top 1-3 directories you want your articles to appear on. Then put on your headset or pull out your microphone and record a version of each article as an MP3 file, being sure to include an audio version of your Author’s Resource Box at the end with any URLs spelled out for people to copy down or type in.

When you’re happy with the recording, post it to your blog along with the summary you had written for the article or a similar paragraph or two of teaser copy designed to get your visitors to click the player and hear the article. Then, just as you did with the original article, submit your podcasts to the various podcast directories.

And that’s all it takes for this advanced affiliate marketing strategy. Because all the original research and content had been done to create the articles, all that needed to be done to create podcasts was top read the article and record it as an MP3 file. Thus, with very little extra work you’ve potentially doubled both your reach within your target market and the number of affiliate marketing leads you derive from it.

If you wish, multiply your effect once more by taking this advanced affiliate marketing strategy one step further. Now that you have both the article and the audio, import the audio into your video editing software as the soundtrack and match up the text from the article to it along the timeline. Render it with or without a custom background and you now have a video version of the article as well, one you can now use to target additional affiliate marketing leads, this time through the video sharing sites.

Eventually every successful affiliate marketer realizes that promoting affiliate offers that pay residual commissions is a great way to boost your affiliate commissions – web hosting, autoresponders, membership sites and the like can pay out month after month from one original sale. In fact, any affiliate sale that leads to the buyer paying monthly fees should lead to residual affiliate commissions unless they’re set up on a cost-per-acquisition-based front-end-loaded commission structure.

Residual affiliate commissions are the best way for an affiliate to build their income long-term, since each month you’ve got residuals commissions coming in on top of the commissions you’ve made that month. Until you reach the advanced affiliate marketing strategies, though, most affiliates don’t make as much as they should from such offers.

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The reason is simple – they treat their residual affiliate commissions offers the same way they do the more common one-off sale offers. They promote it two or three times to their list, blog about it and then move on to the next offer, and this myopic view of how to promote residual commissions offers means they’re leaving a lot of potential profits still lying on the table waiting for a more advanced affiliate marketer to pick them up.

These offers usually pay the most for your time invested, since you usually continue to make affiliate commissions for months, even years, after you promote them. As such, these are the offers you should be spending more time on than most. Sending it to your list and blogging about it should be just the start of your advanced affiliate marketing mix for residual commissions offers – after all, the effect of the e-zine promos only lasts a few days at best, and your blog probably only reaches less than 1% of your potential target market.

Residual affiliate commissions can be maximized by using every long-term traffic building technique you know, from article marketing and social bookmarking to podcasting, video marketing, forum marketing, etc. It’s also a good time to considering using pay per click (PPC) advertising, since the lifetime value of each sale is higher than most single sales opportunities. Just be sure you calculate the average duration that each sale is sticking with the service or site so that you don’t over-bid on your PPC – it’s easy to lose money on a pay per click campaign if you don’t know what you’re doing and track your results closely.

But by using all of your advanced affiliate marketing arsenal, you can build up a strong funnel to continue leading targeted prospects to the site long after you’ve moved on to other promotions, leaving your long-term systems in place to keep you earning residual affiliate marketing commissions for some time to come!

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Super-affiliate marketing mentor Doug Champigny has plenty of free advanced affiliate marketing information for you on his Start-Affiliate Marketing WetPaint site and at Affiliate Marketing Revealed, or you can learn the processes directly under his tutelage through his PowerStart Affiliate Marketing Coaching Program. And be sure to introduce yourself to Doug Champigny when he makes one of his many live appearances onstage at a marketing seminar, conference, convention or workshop near you!